Explore

Four text adventure games - a bit of retro fun! Survive to escape and win!

Explore the "Enchanted Cave", the "Lost Mine", the "Medieval Castle", and the "Haunted House"! Find clues along the way and employ objects you find in order to escape and win!

Before 3D graphics were widely available for use in games, there existed a few classic adventure games that relied on words to spark the imagination of the player. When I was a young teenager, I was enthralled by such games as "Adventure" (it takes place in "Colossal Cave"), which was alive with magic at every turn.

Inspired by this classic, my cousin and I would stay up late into the night, inventing our own fictional worlds and writing our own adventure language interpreter, called "Explore". In the process, we created the first three adventures included in this app ("Cave", "Mine", and "Castle"). Unlike these first three, the last adventure, "Haunted House", is based on Radio Shack's old TRS-80 game, recreated for the Explore adventure interpreter in an effort to preserve its legacy here.

Through "Explore", you can visit these magical worlds. By using simple one or two-word commands, you can walk around, find items that will be useful later, and follow clues to help you escape and win. if you need some help getting started after selecting an adventure, just enter the "help" command.

By today's standards, these old "text adventures" may seem quaint, but many people still find them a fun challenge. These worlds exist in your mind's eye, with all the richness of reading a novel. You can see, explore, and interact with your surroundings using only your imagination, and this can be quite a cool experience!